What Apple didn’t announce for iPhone OS 3.0

Apple announced some great new features for iPhone OS 3. OS.

Now that we know what Apple announced on Tuesday at its iPhone OS 3.0 preview event, it's time to go over what wasn't announced. Between escalating rumors, increased competition, and good ol' fashioned feature requests, Apple didn't quite satisfy everyone's appetites. The following is an exploration of what is still missing from iPhone OS 3.0 that some would still like to see.

Better app organization

Apple announced new iPhone OS features that will undoubtedly inspire us to buy even more apps, but the company has yet to tackle the growing problem of how to organize them all. If just a couple extra pages' worth of apps pile up, dragging the spastic icons between pages and dealing with accidental moves is already annoying. If you are on the better half of the nine-page app limit, organizing them all becomes downright unruly.

A number of potential solutions have already been conjured up by Apple-watchers. Ideas range from some kind of overarching onboard UI to an iTunes window that would let users organize more efficiently with a mouse. Either way, with over 25,000 apps already available, any new tools that make it easier to rearrange them all will be quite welcome.

A more useful Springboard

Springboard is the application that manages the iPhone's Home screen, applications, and Dock, but it doesn't do much else. In iPhone OS 3.0, Apple introduced an intriguing new piece of UI in the form of flicking left from the Home screen to access Spotlight, a new application-wide search feature that can find contacts, bookmarks, apps, calendar appointments, and more.

Flicking left is a great way to expose this kind of a system-wide feature, but there is a lot more potential here that Apple could explore and, even better, make available to third parties. Imagine flicking up from any application page to access Spotlight, or flicking down to access, say, a third-party utility like Google's voice-powered search app or even a future turn-by-turn directions app.

Landscape mode for everyone

Scott Forstall made a big deal about bringing Mobile Safari's landscape mode and wide keyboard to the rest of Apple's native apps, but he said nothing about third parties. Update: That's because he didn't need to—landscape mode has been available to developers for a while. This was a mistaken observation on my part because I don't ever use landscape.

Exchange was mostly MIA

The majority of Apple's event centered on what were arguably too many demos, which seemed to force Forstall to breeze through the latter half that dealt with other features. While some features that are on business users' must-have lists did appear—such as OS-wide search that includes Mail—Exchange was mostly MIA. There was no talk about features like viewing event invitation response changes or browsing files on the server. This also ties into our next complaint.

No to-do app

Apple is finally bringing note syncing to iPhone OS 3.0, but what about to-dos? The company made a big deal about opening up the event and to-do calendar store in Leopard with Core Services, allowing apps like Mail to create new to-dos from messages that sync to iCal. But why can we still not sync those to-dos to our iPhones in the third iteration of the iPhone OS? Whether you sync PIM information with iTunes, MobileMe, or your company's Exchange server, Apple is still largely ignoring to-dos in the native iPhone OS.

Video recording

Setting aside the conversation about all that is wrong with the iPhone's camera, video recording received no love at Apple's event. A number of third parties like Qik have had iPhone apps in private beta for some time, but so far, none have appeared to fill the void left by Apple.

In fact, as far as we have learned, most third parties have not even submitted their apps to the App Store, and they seem adamant about not discussing why.

Video section for the iPhone's iTunes Store

Granted, we don't remember seeing this come across the rumor mill, but it's a valid request for the iPhone's iTunes Store app. Plus, if I can get anecdotal for this one, I blew through all three episodes of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Gig 2 that I brought for the 4.5 hour flight to cover Tuesday's event. Since my main iTunes library is on my Mac at home, I couldn't access the other episodes or purchase new shows for my returning flight. Bummer.

Of course, downloading even a short, 11-minute, 129MB Robot Chicken episode over 3G would be grueling, but WiFi seems quite reasonable. Perhaps renaming the iPhone's on-board store to "iTunes WiFi, 3G, and EDGE for Music but only WiFi for Video" hasn't gotten a thumbs up from the iPhone or iTunes teams yet.

Other App Store improvements

This topic has been explored at length by developers and consumers alike, but even with forthcoming enhancements like micro-content, there are still a number of features missing from the App Store experience. Sure, developers can more easily offer things like e-book readers (and fork over 30 percent of content sales now—in addition to app sales) and more game levels. But they still cannot let customers try out a full product for free or even work by a clear and thorough set of criteria for app approval and rejection.

Flash

Yes, Flash was a no-show at the event as well. There are plenty of arguments for and against bringing Adobe's rich media platform to the iPhone, and even though it was brought up during the event's Q&A, Phil Schiller was quick to fire off a "no comment."

The increased freedom in iPhone OS 3.0 for developers to charge micro-payments for additional app content through the App Store is another tick on Apple's reasons for still denying Flash. While other arguments against the feature include decreased battery life and Apple's desire to promote Web standards like HTML 5 and CSS 3, Flash poses a major threat to the App Store cash cow.

Still, it is interesting that Schiller offered a "no comment" instead of a categorical denial. Venturing out on the limb thatvariousAdobeemployeeskeepextending, it is entirely possible that Apple is working with Adobe to create some kind of neutered form of a Flash plug-in for Mobile Safari. This plug-in could exclude certain kinds of App-Store-trouncing content, such as games, while allowing users to still visit less threatening Flash websites.

Then again, maybe Apple isn't working with Adobe.

Plug-ins and any other runtime environments

Speaking of Flash plug-ins, Apple also made no mention of allowing other platforms like Java onto the iPhone. Dual arguments of performance and cutting into App Store sales are often made here, but even alternative Web rendering engines, such as Firefox's Gecko, still appear to be forbidden. Yes, Apple allowed alternative browsers past its App Store velvet rope earlier this year, but they're still just based on the same WebKit rendering engine that Safari uses.

One could argue that it is possible for other browser vendors to port to WebKit in order to win Apple's approval. Still, I have a feeling that the folks at Opera and Mozilla might smack you before you could finish the sentence.

Unified messaging

If Palm has done anything interesting besides the Pre in the last five years, it's unified messaging. With early Treos, Palm introduced the ability to view (and reply to) e-mails and SMSes in a single list. Smart. On the Pre, Palm is adding new services like Facebook into the mix, making it even easier to stay on top of increasingly diverse correspondence in a very social media 21st century.

Apple, in its persistent inability to embrace Web trends (after all, it's a software and hardware company), has decided to not yet hop on this bandwagon with iPhone OS 3.0. E-mails are still collected with Mail, which you need to quit if you want to check on your SMS backlog. Facebook messages remain in the realm of the Facebook app, and playing musical chairs with all of these apps in order to keep in touch with friends and coworkers is the way it shall be in Apple's latest OS.

Nothing specific for new hardware

Apple's event Tuesday was all about software, but It is worth noting that none of the new features screamed for new hardware. The majority of iPhone OS 3.0 will work on the original iPhone, so Apple did not make any fundamental architectural changes that require or "strongly encourage" customers to line up for a yet-to-be announced new device. There is talk about a possible move to a physically larger or higher DPI display in the next generation iPhone, and a physical QWERTY keyboard is still not banished from the realm of possibilities (though we must admit, we remain highly skeptical of such an expectation). None of the new features on display Tuesday, however, were indicative of any such imminent hardware introduction.

Yes, an "iPhone 3.0" to accompany iPhone OS 3.0 is sure to arrive sooner or later. But the new software does not seem to usher in any radical changes to the core of iPhone OS or its UI that necessitate a hardware redesign. An evolutionary—not revolutionary—iPhone that is faster and boasts a larger storage capacity is probably all we should look forward to for now.

Conclusion

iPhone OS 3.0 brings a broad array of new features for both developers and consumers that should not be overlooked. But while Apple is both blazing interesting new trails in mobile devices (App Store micro-content, Push Notifications) and catching up to age-old features (search in Mail), more work is always waiting anxiously to be done. Did we miss any notable requests or lacking OS features? You know what to do.

When Apple previewed iPhone 2.0 they did not disclose all of the user interface changes that came when 2.0 was launched. They certainly did not literally show all 1000 API's. So their are likely still some features to come.

Little was said about Safari 4 or HTML 5. There is certainly more info to come regarding the web.

As A long time Palm User and a Moderator on a Treo/Centro centered board I have to wonder. . . "If Palm has done anything interesting besides the Pre in the last five years, it's unified messaging. With early Treos, Palm introduced the ability to view (and reply to) e-mails and SMSes in a single list"What Where This is news to me :-\

Another missing piece, unless it's there and they aren't telling anyone, is some way for applications to sync data or files between the iPhone and the desktop computer. The only option right now is to reinvent the wheel and write your own server.

Apple seems more interested in games than in applications that require moving data back and forth. I don't see why they cannot provide this.

Knowing how Apple does things, and I could be wrong but I thought some structure on this was commented on yesterday, but the Apps should automatically be organized the way the are in App Store.

I personally would like to organize them in my own folders, but Apple will probably want them to be organized their way. My phone became full a month ago and now have just stopped from deleting and will wait until they fix this "problem" because that's what this really is.

Landscape keyboards are available in the current SDK and there are several applications already in the App Store that take advantage of them. So, it's pretty clear they are now supported across the board.

I'd love if they made support for Java available.Surely it couldn't be too hard to port the iPhone SDK to Java.

I can't see how that would affect Apples business. If they created a Java SDK they woiuld get more developers creating apps and games for the app store + more developers paying the $99 per year. That will lead to even more revenue.

I'm a Java developer and the idea of going to basically an OO C/C++ language would feel like a step back. I hated C/C++!

Most of what's "still missing" in this list falls into the who cares category for most people I think. It seems to me that Apple really did address the concerns of the *actual* end user with this one (as opposed to just what the tech bloggers agitate for).

A lot of the items here are things that are not needed at all and would only *diminish* the user experience like Mozilla getting it's rendering engine supported, or Adobe getting it's rendering engine supported, etc. Here's hoping that neither ever actually happen.

As for video, the article really isn't clear if video apps are being disallowed in the app store or if it's just that no one wants to make them so it's hard to comment one way or the other. A discussion of the crucial problems involved might have helped there. It's certain that such an app can't be done *well* at this point, even if Apple did it, (which is likely why they haven't done it yet.)

I would still expect beefier hardware sometime soon and possibly even new devices. It seems to me that they are following the model of not updating the software to do things that the hardware cannot yet support, so i would expect better camera(s) for instance in the next iPhone and video apps when those new devices have achieved significant market penetration.

While some of the stuff on your list is certainly fair (and other parts are silly), your complaint about to-dos stood out for me as it raises some fundamental questions. Really, why do you think this should be part of the OS? Don't third-party applications like OmniFocus handle this sort of thing much, much better then Apple could ever be expected to? It seems like the needs of end users can be extremely variable here, which makes it a fertile market but not something that should clearly be built-in.

Now there is plenty of use for support functions built in to the OS, like common data stores to help third-party applications more easily work together. But putting that together (via Core Services or otherwise) in no way means Apple should themselves build something on top of it. At what point is the line crossed for application vs OS functionality I wonder? It seems to be a pretty perennial debate, but in this case I feel your complaint falls on the wrong side of the line. I think Apple should dump that from iCal and focus on making iCal function much better as, well, a calendar. It's poor right now at its most basic function, including both features and UI. Building something that other "to-do" apps could connect with better would be a more efficient and useful use of Apple's time in my opinion.

I was generally pleased with everything announced. I would love to see a move to Unified messaging, but the still have little things todo before they get to that. I think they will release an updated iPhone 3G this year but it will be incremental. Maybe...

Basically a small upgrade refreshing a few features using newer silicon that also enables better battery life. I have a Touch 2G and playing a game with iPod audio in the background drains it pretty quick and the battery on the original 3G is not loved. Apple is big on battery tech these days and of course it will be 'more greener' for the environment.

The landscape keyboard bit has been edited (but not removed entirely) to reflect my wrongness. Turns out I don't really use landscape view (I hate it) unless I'm in a game or something that requires it, so I was just out of the loop. Thanks for the heads up guys.

I haven't really followed the hype around this. Did they introduce tethering via bluetooth or not?

Scott Forstall acknowledged in Q&A that tethering is indeed now supported in the OS, but it is entirely up to the worldwide carriers, including AT&T, on whether to turn it on. Given the fact that the iPhone is so popular at the moment and owners are bringing down networks with just mobile data, I doubt many of the carriers are leaping at the opportunity just yet to invite such a greater network load until they have the right equipment in place to handle it.

You forgot one: BACKGROUND APPLICATIONS. While push notifications are nice for some things, it is worthless for others: ie background audio. I wish they would just allow 1-3 user selected apps to be run in the background. Its easy to do (see Backgrounder on Cydia) and stupid not to have. The battery excuse is meaningless- the iPod app decreases battery life but that is allowed.

Re: the absence of any sensible solution for an included ToDo App, I firmly believe that this is because anything like that would need to sync for it to be useful, and as the desktop ToDo as currently integrated into Mail and iCal is so poor that they would be better off waiting for it's replacement that will hopefully ship with Snow Leopard.

I just hope that there is a message "centre" for all the alerts you will now receive, so that if you aren't able to deal with them on the spot you can go back and look at them later. In the current OS, if you press Cancel, you lose them forever which is annoying to say the least. With regard to that, they desperately need a "Defer" button as well as the Cancel and View ones.

I thought they should add more pages, in the various compass directions from the homescreen. Up, down, left. It would open up the number of quickly available applications by a substantial number. (Technically 4 pages + would be 1 swipe away.)

(Lets say 8 screens in each direction, that's 32 screens of apps, double-tap to bring home; never mind doing a full array of screens in each direction as a 16x16 grid.).

A good interface, to a large number of applications is going to be a real challenge though, with Folders, or things like it being the worst possible solution to the problem. Digging for apps would get to be a real nuisance.

Java verses Object-C/C++ If you can't pick Objective-C basic syntax up in about 2 hours you shouldn't be programming in Java either. Seriously, Objective-C is pretty sweet. The API is very different in many ways, but they isn't going to change even if they did decide to support Java as a language. The API is well designed and highly functional.

I would not mind a tweak in Mail - to mix all Inboxes of multiple accounts into one, like it's done in Apple Mail on Mac.Checking all three accounts takes way too many clicks now.Noted that more than year ago! Here http://cubeover.blogspot.com/2...rience-comments.html

I usually really enjoy your articles, David, so I'm amazed to find myself thoroughly disagreeing with so much of this one. From the little things like "no new hardware" (would Apple really be dumb enough to give away secret new hardware features in a software demo?), through the medium things like "unified messaging" (just a repulsive idea to me, as things like email, SMS and Facebook have completely different priorities in my life), to the big ones like Flash (good golly no, on so many levels).

To-do sync seems like it would be logical for OS X, though, even though I don't use it at all. And whilst better app management would be useful for some users, I think Apple's version of the 80/20 rule (plus their usual unilateral approach to things) probably means it's an unrealistic hope.

I think that the iPhone OS and its UI is for Apple (and for us) now what the very first Mac and its OS was for the users back then many years ago. I absolutely and totally give Apple all time they may need to slowly and carefully develop and try out features and UI elements which the users express a need for and I give them any freedom to toss out and to not implement all features that may be nice to have, but not really necessary. This is *not* a system that will be replaced by some new fashionable flashy UI two years from now. It will stay with us for decades to come, so be careful what to wish for.

Now that it seems that Apple is very much listening to the customers (landscape apps, c&p, MMS) I rather give them time to work it out.

And you can now bet on a tablet (aka Apple "netbook" or "iPad") coming soon, the OS for it is shaping up nicely. They would've never wasted their time on landscape mode for Mail and other apps if they weren't preparing for a tablet. I'm looking forward to it. The world has already more than enough laptops shrunken to unusable size.

Originally posted by Andy Allcorn:I usually really enjoy your articles, David, so I'm amazed to find myself thoroughly disagreeing with so much of this one. From the little things like "no new hardware" (would Apple really be dumb enough to give away secret new hardware features in a software demo?), through the medium things like "unified messaging" (just a repulsive idea to me, as things like email, SMS and Facebook have completely different priorities in my life), to the big ones like Flash (good golly no, on so many levels).

Don't mistake my listing of these things as a personal wish for each one to arrive. I hope the likes of Flash and Java never come to the iPhone. In fact I'm willing to pay for a version of the iPhone OS that does not have them. I was mainly aiming to hit the major features that all camps are looking for in the iPhone—regardless of my personal opinion of them. Thanks for enjoying my work though. It's very appreciated.

As far as Apple being "dumb enough" to hint at new hardware: the company does it all the time. In fact, it actually did hint at something even in the iPhone OS 3.0 beta:

It's incredibly vague, though, so I didn't include it in this piece. Nevertheless, stuff like that has happened plenty of times in the past, and in various ways. Products get marked as EOL (End Of Life), references to new hardware appear in plist files, new products have been "accidentally" published to the Apple Store.

As far as unified messaging, I guess that may come down to a personal preference and differences in work. I use Facebook, mail, and SMS for very different purposes as well, but having to switch between all those apps just to keep up with correspondence can become a pain. My wife may send me an e-mail one day, a text when she's coming home from work the next, and then comment on one of my Facebook status messages (which is powered by Twitter). I don't want all that correspondence tied to and strewn across all those apps—I want it all threaded together with a unified UI to my wife. Since I also use things like Facebook and Twitter to communicate with readers so I don't have to give away my personal contact info, this compounds my wish for something like what Palm did.

quote:

To-do sync seems like it would be logical for OS X, though, even though I don't use it at all.

Yea, this is a simple case of Apple missing a basic necessity. Tracking tasks along with events has existed in PIM apps since before the dawn of time, and some validly argue that a smartphone isn't very smart without them.

quote:

And whilst better app management would be useful for some users, I think Apple's version of the 80/20 rule (plus their usual unilateral approach to things) probably means it's an unrealistic hope.

You're probably right, but users are still clamoring for it. Shifting apps around on an iPhone is a PITA, plain and simple. It's frustrating as hell for me since I have seven pages, but I see people with only two or three complain all the time.

I really hope there is some kind of smart notification management system. Let's say you leave your iPhone alone for a few hours and come back to 20 notifications. Do you have to click through all of them, can you dismiss all and go back later to review them and react to some of them (like the notification "curtain" in Android)? Questions over questions.

You forgot Disk Mode and unfettered filesystem access without needing to jailbreak (we can dream, right?) in the list.

Here was the feedback I sent to Apple after watching the keynote, requesting improved app/Springboard organization and some sort of unified Documents folder with Disk Mode access:

quote:

I just finished watching the iPhone OS 3.0 announcement, and although I am extremely happy to see the progress you guys have made, and the new features implemented, I did notice one glaring omission in particular that is critically needed ASAP, along with another change (maybe for iPhone OS 3.1) that would be nice to see. I've been using my first revision iPhone since August of '07, I have only minor experience with Mac application development in general, and none for the iPhone in particular, so these suggestions are mostly from an end user's perspective.

My first and most critical issue is that my iPhone is now filled with the maximum of 148 apps, and I'm having trouble deciding which apps I can delete and live without, to the point that I have severely reduced my purchasing of new apps, and my frequency of checking for interesting new apps to get. Not only that, but it's gotten extremely tedious to page through nine pages of apps to get to the one I'm looking for.

A somewhat related additional significant improvement needed is to allow multiple applications to access the same files, and to consolidate saved files into a "Documents" type directory, one which would be accessible from your computer when you sync your iPhone. This would empower users to more easily edit documents from the iPhone, access standard file formats from the desktop world, and potentially cut down on wasted storage space as different apps are each forced to store their own copies of their documents. We could optionally save a Notes document or picture there, for example, and then another app could access these and modify them or make use of their content. We could sync a MS Word doc to the Documents folder, and some apps might be able to open and edit it, or we could then sync with our work or home computer and transfer it to there. The current "workaround" of using email for transfers is sub-optimal, to say the least, not even addressing many of these usage cases.

For the first problem, what we need is a solution that allows us to install >148 apps total, and to better organize our apps than by placing them on different Springboard screens. I think the best solution to this would be a method to add meta-tags to files and applications on the iPhone, and then empower Springboard to consolidate apps based on meta-tags; in short a database filesystem metaphor, similar to iTunes Genre organization. When you click and hold on an app in Springboard, in addition to an "X" button at the top of the app icons, there could also be an "i" button at the bottom that would open a sheet where you could enter a "Tag" string. Any unique strings you create in the "Tag" field show up as a "folder" in the Springboard named with the string, with all the apps tagged with that string inside it. When you click and hold on the "folder" icons in Springboard and click the "i" button for it, you are given the option to modify the name (which would modify the current "Tag" value for all the apps in that folder), and to set an image icon for that folder, which would let you choose from a list of default icons with typical themes, to select an existing picture, or to copy and paste your own image in.

For the second issue with unified documents, we could use a similar "Tag" system to organize the documents within, and apps could set the Tag value for the documents they save as well. For the interface, I would see little alternative to putting tabs at the top of the Springboard, right below the status bar, for "Applications" and "Documents". I'm having some flashbacks of AtEase already (in a good way : P)... For the implementation/security, it might be a good idea to leave optional access to the "Documents" directory up to the app developers only if they want it, and if a 3rd party app does request access to this directory, maybe have the user confirm that they want to give that app access to the docs directory, with a brief mention of the security implications, the first time they run the app (if the user declines, the app would automatically revert to using the app-specific Documents folder inside the .app package). Ideally, this "Documents" directory would be mounted as a virtual read/write USB Mass Storage Device on your computer when you plug in your iPhone (maybe labeled as "[iphonename] Documents"), and you could just drag files to and from there or delete them in the Finder or in Windows Explorer rather than having to use iTunes for that. This transfer method, if possible, would also give the incidental benefit of being compatible with Linux, and maybe with various equipment capable of interfacing with USB Mass Storage Devices, in addition to giving the user a very powerful, widely compatible and fail-safe method of accessing these sometimes critical documents. An additional security precaution would force all the contents of the Documents directory to be non-executable from the iPhone OS, only allowing read and write access to them, hopefully using a method that preserves the original UNIX file permissions as those files get transferred to and from the iPhone (so an executable Mac app would remain executable after you transfer it to and from an iPhone, but an unencrypted iPhone app transferred to the Documents directory from your computer would not execute from the iPhone itself).

Thank you for considering these changes to iPhone OS X, which would greatly improve the usability of the iPhone for me, and hopefully for a few other people as well.

@xoa: The problem is that iPhone users are meant to use the Calendar app to manage their schedules, and 3rd party apps can't write to your calendar. So if you did install OmniFocus on your iPhone, it wouldn't be able to integrate directly with your calendar, which is weak. If Apple is going to provide things like email, calendar, etc. standard, and not allow direct competitors to these apps in the App Store, then they need to find ways to make these extensible by 3rd parties in useful ways, or we end up with a crippled device. Ideally, Apple should let the user choose to allow certain apps write access to their calendar, contacts, etc.

@apple4ever: There is a difference between the iPod app being backgrounded and something like Pandora being backgrounded, as the latter is constantly requesting network access. This might have a much more significant impact on the performance of other foreground apps than the iPod app would. I'm not familiar with the details, but is it possible that the iPod app uses a separate backend daemon process to handle the music playback, and when you quit the frontend, the backend process remains running? Maybe App Store apps just don't have the option of structuring themselves in the same way so as to free up most of their memory when they're running in the background, allowing other apps to run acceptably. About the only way I would see Apple making any progress on this front short of massive hardware upgrades would be to have some sort of advanced (read: costly) validation available to 3rd party devs that want to be certified to run in the background.

I'm still looking for a couple features that make it easier to use iPhone as a phone. Quaint, I know.

Specifically, some kind of system-wide, always-aware voice dialing would make using iPhone while in the car easier and safer. Some of the third party apps are reasonable, but Apple needs to implement dead-simple voice dialing, including touch-to-dial with Bluetooth headsets. With the improved Bluetooth support in 3.0, I'm hopeful, but didn't see or hear it mentioned yesterday.

On the same front, some way to touch-dial someone from the home screen should be a default. The lack of physical buttons makes this hard, but there should be a way to put a contact on the home screen (beyond the current hacky ways) and touch to dial.

Beyond that, there wasn't much said about Exchange support beyond policies (which is a big one for IT departments). They need to beef up the calendar support, in particular.

I was glad to read that most of these are not your opinions, because a lot of them are terrible ideas.I agreed with the video, to do (exchange request may be included in CALDAV), better listing for trial version of the app store, and perhaps springboard enhancements.

All Minor things really, accept the to do and video.

I really think there was no video or camera announcement because that will be the "hardware improvement" for the next version of the iPhone. The current easiest enhancement is the iPhone Video (you can't call it the iPhone v3)

(I also strongly disagree with that statement that apple doesn't embrace web trends, since they make the software that is how you see the web, and in their newest mac software has links to facebook and flicker. I will agree that they are slow to uptake, as they should be web trends change frequently)

The chattering class has a fetishistic indulgence with smartphones bordering on techno-porn.[...]While analysts and competitors were busy making feature-level comparisons (of mostly hardware), Apple consolidated its platform lead and laid the foundations of a new growth engine the likes of which the mobile industry has neither yet seen nor fully comprehends.[...]While [the iPhone OS 3.0] garnered a collective yawn from the features-fetishists, barring a product introduction disaster, the iPhone OS 3.0 will do to iPhone-killers what it did do to iPod-killers half a decade ago. Apple consolidated its gains, marked its territory of 30M users+25K apps+800M downloads and built a very deep and wide moat around it. A moat so formidable that there’s not a single smartphone player capable of overcoming it.[...]By the end of 2009, we expect the virtuous cycle to kick in and the moat strategy to reveal just how difficult it will be to compete with Apple’s touch platform, thereby ushering in consolidation in the rest of the smartphone industry.